This Week in Fiction: Callan Wink

Callan Wink, whose story "Dog Run Moon" appears this week in the magazine, chats with fiction editor Cressida Leyshon.

_This week’s story opens with a naked man and a dog running under a moon. Did you always know the story would start with this scene? Did the story’s title come first or last?_When I started this story I knew I wanted to write about a man running, in a very literal sense, away from pursuers. The running naked theme came about, I think, from popular stories about the mountain man John Colter, who, supposedly, outran a war party of hostile Crow after they stripped him naked and told him to run for his life. This happened near present day Three Forks, Montana, not far from where I live.

As for the title, when I’m in the beginning stages of working on something I’ll save it on my computer using three or four words that seem to be indicative of the direction I want the story to go. Usually I come up with a different title. In this case it ended up sticking.

_The protagonist, Sid, is running across the sandstone rimrock that rises above the town where he lives, which is described as a “shattered Martian landscape of jumbled rock,” and the story plays close attention to the natural world. Is this a particular landscape you’re familiar with or one that you invented?_

The setting of the story is somewhat of a hybrid of two places I know and love. The town itself, (the rail yard, the bar, the incinerator etc) is heavily influenced by where I live in Livingston, Montana. The actual desert landscape is based on the area around Moab, Utah— the red rocks and canyons, with the La Sal mountains in the distance—where I try to go at least once or twice a year to run and get the occasional reprieve from long Montana winters.

_The story tracks forward and back in time, both during the night Sid spends running from two pursuers and in the account of the days leading up to his flight. Was it complicated to manage these shifting time frames? Did you ever think about using a simpler chronology?_It wasn’t difficult for me to keep the chronology straight but I was worried about whether or not readers would get confused. However, after giving the story to a few people to read, it seemed like, for whatever reason, the chronology wasn’t too distracting. Although you wouldn’t know it from this story, I’m actually a pretty big fan of just telling a story straight, from beginning to end. I think if you do play around with chronology you need to do it for a reason, and in this one, I wanted the shifts to reveal something about Sid’s state of mind. Introducing large portions of backstory after we see Sid running seemed natural to me in this case, just because the act of running seems to lend itself to reflection on past events. For me, at the beginning of a run, I’m thinking about my immediate problems, whatever they may be, and then the longer I go, the more I find myself rehashing events or situations that are less recent. I’m not sure if this is the case for other people but I guess I wanted this phenomenon to be reflected in the somewhat fractured narrative.

_You’re a runner yourself. Can you imagine running over these rocks barefoot? Have you ever pushed yourself as hard as Sid does here?_I do a lot of running, mostly on trails in the mountains near where I live. The barefoot running thing is actually a popular trend in the running community right now. There’s a growing body of evidence proposing that many injuries runner sustain actually develop from the way shoes negatively affect our biomechanics. All of that aside, there is something pretty damn liberating about just taking off your shoes and running. However, going barefoot over the terrain Sid is covering would probably not be pleasant, although there are those (not me) who have hardened their feet enough to make it bearable. I have some shoes that are supposedly the closest thing to being barefoot, while still providing a little protection. I wear those and don’t have to worry about removing sharp objects from the soles of my feet.

Regarding Sid’s run, I wanted it to be painful and trying, but not implausible. In this story I would say Sid runs for around five hours. Some of the trail races I run are in this range (twenty to twenty-five miles over rough terrain) and this might seem like a lot until you realize that people fairly regularly run trails races in excess of a hundred miles. I guess I’m familiar with the place your mind goes when you have been exerting yourself for a long time, it’s agonizing and strangely therapeutic, and I wanted to try and capture that a little in this story.

I always come back to this idea that the act of moving forward physically somehow tricks your mind into a feeling that you are moving forward on greater problems or concerns in your life. In other words, my personal relationships are in shambles, I’m perpetually broke, my job is soul sucking, but, if I can go out and move bodily from point A to point B, and exhaust myself doing it, I have somehow taken steps to remedy my situation. This, of course, is a completely false illusion, but the effects last for a while and when they wear off you go for another run. Maybe it’s some sort of brain-chemical addiction thing, I don’t know.

_You’re currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming. Has this changed the way you approach your writing? Are you working on stories while you’re there or do you have a longer project in mind?_On a very basic level coming to Wyoming has allowed me to start thinking of myself as a writer and taking my writing seriously. Before MFA, writing was this strange little neurotic activity I engaged in in furtive spurts after my days spent working construction or retail or fishing guiding. But, since I’ve been in Wyoming, there has been this shift, in that, the writing is now the main focus, everything else is peripheral. And, depending upon how the writing is going at the moment, this can seem too good to be true, or acutely painful. More than anything else though, coming to Wyoming has benefited me in that I’ve had the good fortune to work with some extremely talented and generous writers, both students and faculty. Brad Watson, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Alyson Hagy (and too many others to list here) have gone out of their way to give my work careful, serious, readings and I’m extremely grateful for that. On a more general note, the program at Wyoming is truly exceptional and much of that is a direct result of the enthusiasm, vision, and hard work of the program director, Beth Loffreda. My decision to come to Wyoming was based largely her obvious commitment to seeing students succeed.

Most of my writing at Wyoming has been short stories. Something about the workshop format just doesn’t really lend itself to the novel. That being said, I have a couple of longer things I’ve been working on here and there. I want to write one or two more stories this semester and then revise the pile of older ones sitting on my desk into some sort of collection. I think after that I will work more seriously on my novel projects.

_One of Sid’s pursuers is wearing Sperry Top-Siders, which end up becoming the one piece of clothing for this naked man in the story. Why did you choose Top-Siders?_To me, Top-siders evoke images of pastel polo shirt-wearing men of leisure who enjoy sailing and tennis. Nothing wrong with any of these things of course, it’s just that the landscape Sid is operating in stands in such stark opposition to this other, more genteel world. Obviously, “boat shoes” are extremely unpractical in a desert. I actually have a pair, and they are pretty much useless unless you’re on flat pavement or the deck of your yacht. The fact that Charlie Chaplin wears Top-Siders seems to be indicative of some greater disconnect between him and the environment through which the characters are traveling. When Sid puts them on in the end he is taking on some of this discordance. By putting on the shoes he puts a layer of rubber between himself and the rock he’d been so intimate with for most of the story. He becomes more “man,” more aware of his nakedness and reliance on technology.